designrush

What Is A Digital Strategy Agency?

A digital strategy agency grows brands online to improve the business performance of its clients. They define the goals of a digital project and outline the most effective ways for reaching them.

Simply put, a digital strategy firm establishes the overall course and guidelines that a business follows in a digital world to create new competitive advantages.

The term “digital strategy” is often used interchangeably with digital transformation. Although closely related, they differ scope-wise.

Digital transformation agency uses digital technology to create or modify a company’s internal operational processes, models and customer experience to meet market challenges.

Digital transformation requires coordination across the organization and it involves massive business culture changes. 70% of companies globally either have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working on one.

Digital strategy, on the other hand, mainly focuses on technology and its actionable derivates to create the capabilities ventures need to morph into digital businesses. Setting your tactics and goals is a key element of the process and it ensures that technology is used to support business objectives.

Digital strategy consulting is essential for all businesses who wish to scale and succeed in a highly competitive environment because it ensures all your business goals are in line with your digital goals.

Experts working on a digital strategy within a digital strategy agency
Hiring a digital strategy agency will help you achieve success in the growing digital climate

What Does A Digital Strategy Firm Do?

Digital strategy consulting forms immediate, month-to-month roadmaps, tied to actionable items and measurable business objectives.

Digital strategy services are made up of a multitude of distinct components. Depending on your industry and your business type, some of them will be more relevant to you than others.

But before deconstructing the strategy, we need to closely examine the pre-planning steps every agency establishes when approaching a project:

  • Setting/Streamlining your vision: Decide the business goals that you want your strategy to achieve.
  • Research and information gathering: One of the most important aspects of this strategy is researching your competitors and evaluating their overall digital presence. It also encompasses researching your target audience, reviewing keywords and other SEO key metrics, as well as researching market trends and potential disruptors.
  • Analyzing the research: Evaluate your research, uncover any gaps and remedy any issues that have been identified. Outline the “good, bad and ugly” performance aspects of your digital presence to focus your efforts and streamline time management.
Looking for the best creative agencies?
FIND THEM HERE

What Are The Key Components Of Digital Strategy Services?

1. Establishing your online presence

Your online presence is determined by how your target audience sees your company online. This usually includes:

  • Your website
  • Social media profiles
  • Corporate advertising profiles
  • Articles, reviews, testimonials and links on other businesses’ websites

2. Implementing digital marketing strategies

Digital marketing focuses on promoting your business using tools and online resources like websites, micro-sites, mobile applications, paid ads and social media platforms. These may include PPC techniques like search engine marketing (SEM), Facebook and Google ads, as well as organic methods like blogs, guest posts, newsletters, email marketing, etc.

3. Online selling/eCommerce strategy

Opting for online selling of your products/services presents your customers with an opportunity to buy from you whenever it is convenient for them. Online selling drastically reduces internal processing time and brings positive value to user experience (UX).

4. Customer/Community interaction

Interacting with your customers is all about giving them access to your business through mobile phone, desktop, traditional phone, or social media platforms. It should require minimal effort on the customer side to find the information about your service/product.

Quality customer experience leads your customers to spend more. In fact, 86% of online buyers are willing to spend more after a satisfying interaction with a brand.

To support your customer engagement, as well as to collect valuable customer data you should use customer relationship management (CRM) systems that help you:

  • Acquire information about your clients/customers
  • Track contacts, callbacks and (pending) deals
  • Track the performance of digital marketing strategies compared to traditional ones
  • Link customer information with accounting software

5. Online security

Information stored on your servers/computers is your greatest, and often, irreplaceable asset. Online security includes:

  • Cloud-based backup systems
  • Secure software/payment systems
  • Staff policies for accessing and storing company data

Besides the above-mentioned digital strategy services, the best agencies also offer omnichannel strategies like:

  • Mobile-based solutions
  • UX Research
  • Efficiencies through technology/Automated processes
  • Measurement & KPIs
  • Content and personalization
  • And more

How Much Does Digital Strategy Agency Charge For Its Services?

Compared to a conventional digital marketing strategy, an all-encompassing digital strategy costs a lot more and takes longer to produce tangible results.

In terms of average cost per hour, US agencies charge anywhere from $100 to $300 per hour.

Depending on what your company needs help with, project scope and where the agency is located, the minimum project cost starts at $5,000+ all the way to $50,000.

A company pricing largely depends on how much work needs to be done within the project/company.

Secondly, the company’s expertise is a major factor in the service cost. Agencies will command a range of prices, depending on the quality of their portfolios, management and resources – all of which play a key role in the quality of their output.

Why Hire A Digital Strategy Company?

Digital strategies are usually where most companies stumble or need help with. Creating the right strategy is a crucial step towards achieving success in the growing digital climate.

Unfortunately, many businesses are stuck in the ways of “old", thinking that traditional efforts are working fine and are not even aware of the benefits hiring a digital strategy company brings.

These are the main reasons why you need this type of consulting:

  • In-depth business discovery
  • Elimination of missed online opportunities
  • Reaching your online audience on the channels they use
  • Digital differentiation
  • Business direction
  • Tracking ROI
  • Getting every department on the same page
  • And more

How To Choose The Best Digital Strategy Agency

Before choosing to work with a single digital strategy agency, it’s imperative to have a clear picture of your business goals.

In fact, for prospective partnership efficiency, you should know your:

  • KPIs and objectives
  • Target audience/Buyer persona
  • Customers’ hangouts
  • Business obstacles and challenges
  • Competitors and key players
  • Strengths and weaknesses

If you can safely answer and fill in this list, it’s easier for your chosen digital strategy agency to supply you with the right roadmap.

Great digital strategy companies share a few attributes. They have an impressive portfolio, professional knowledge and expertise, they have experience in your industry, they can identify your problems and view the business from a neutral perspective.

The best ones, however, expand their skill set even further.

1. They Are The Ones Asking Questions

The ideal digital strategy company can’t facilitate the right tactics if they don’t have all the answers. They may probe you with all kinds, and even seemingly unimportant, questions to develop an in-depth understanding of your business.

2. They Are Willing To Share Their Strategic Approach

Your chosen partner should not only be transparent, but willing to demonstrate their strategic approach, to show you what a cohesive digital strategy could look like for you. It gives you several data points you can look for to evaluate their work.

3. They Know How To Implement

This strategy may be important, but even the best one might fail if an agency lacks the ability to execute it. Your prospective partner isn’t there just to offer professional consulting, but to have the experience, knowledge and team you need to implement and produce tangible results you need.

We've ranked the best IT services & consulting companies.
FIND THEM HERE

10 Questions To Ask When Hiring Digital Strategy Firm

Before you decide to employ USA digital strategy companies, you ought to get a full understanding of the prospective company’s processes, approach and quality of their work.

Ask them the following questions:

  1. Have you worked on projects with similar goals to ours?
  2. What digital tools and media are you familiar with and how have you used them?
  3. How would your experience benefit our company/business?
  4. Can you give us an example of a campaign you executed and its results?
  5. Who would be working on this project? What qualifies them for this role?
  6. What top three platforms would you use to promote our brand and why?
  7. Where would you spend the bulk of the budget?
  8. How would you engage our in-house team during this process?
  9. Who is our point of contact and how often can we expect meetings and updates?
  10. What is the timeframe for a project? How much time a project will take from start to finish?

Takeaways On Digital Strategy Companies

Digital strategy companies help organizations plan for maximizing the business benefits of data assets and technology-focused efforts.

Helmed by a cross-functional team, digital strategy services encompass a multitude of objectives including:

Most digital strategy agencies in the United States charge from $100 to $300 per hour or $5,000 to $50,000 per project.

Best of luck!

...

Scroll Up To Find The Top Digital Strategy Agencies And Pick Your Partner Today.